Is It JUST Semantics? A Case Study of Discourse Particle Understanding in LLMs
This addresses a gap in LLMs' understanding of discourse particles, which is important for natural language processing applications.
This work investigated LLMs' ability to distinguish fine-grained senses of the discourse particle 'just', finding they can differentiate broader categories but struggle with subtle nuances.
Discourse particles are crucial elements that subtly shape the meaning of text. These words, often polyfunctional, give rise to nuanced and often quite disparate semantic/discourse effects, as exemplified by the diverse uses of the particle "just" (e.g., exclusive, temporal, emphatic). This work investigates the capacity of LLMs to distinguish the fine-grained senses of English "just", a well-studied example in formal semantics, using data meticulously created and labeled by expert linguists. Our findings reveal that while LLMs exhibit some ability to differentiate between broader categories, they struggle to fully capture more subtle nuances, highlighting a gap in their understanding of discourse particles.